[CHAPTER XXXIV.]
POETS AFTER WORDSWORTH.
We now turn to the poets of the nineteenth century, after Wordsworth, though the first on the list was his senior in years. He is less important for his work than as the pioneer of the poets who, in the United States, contributed to the poetic literature of the English language.
Philip Freneau.
Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the first American poet of any note. America, colonial or independent, has scarcely any early literary history, which may be mainly accounted for by the preoccupation of men's minds in taming the waste, in dispossessing the warlike natives, in establishing the Puritan theocracy in New England, and in war, whether colonial, against France and her Indian allies, or against the Old Country. Yet we might have expected lyrics, at least, from the non-Puritan settlers of the very literary age of Elizabeth and James I. and from Cavalier exiles of the period of Charles I. They must have been in love; but that poetic passion, among the colonists, was singularly tuneless. We might have looked for volumes on the new country in addition to the learned volume of William Strachey (who compares the religion, rites, and legends of the Red Tribes with those of Greece and Rome) and the larger and more romantic tome of Captain John Smith. The Anglo-Saxon colonists of this Isle of Britain lived even more hardly than the colonists in America; yet we have seen that, even in its scanty fragments, their poetry has distinction, sentiment, and pathos. But American poetry did not begin at the beginning in poems of personal sentiment and experience and in heroic lays. Religion, theological controversy, colonial history, and witchcraft fully occupied the flowing pen of Cotton Mather (1663-1728). The theocracy, like that of Calvin, Knox, and Andrew Melville, which he supported, was broken by the turn of public opinion in 1692, against the hangings of witches on "spectral evidence" (subjective apparitions of the witches to their victims). On the witches, on religion, on colonial history with a controversial purpose ("Magnalia"), and on many other themes, Cotton Mather wrote at enormous length. He was a Bostonian, a Harvard man, and learned; in fact, he was the counterpart of his correspondent, Wodrow, the author of the "History of the Sufferings of the Kirk under the Restoration". His style is Jacobean rather than late Caroline, and the curious will find him "full of matter".
Religion inspired Jonathan Edwards; politics, science, and homely Hesiodic advice occupied Benjamin Franklin, but, as for poetry in America, it begins with Freneau, who was born eight years before Prince Charles's last hope of recovering England failed, and who died in the death year of Sir Walter Scott (1832). Freneau was a sailor, a journalist, a writer of patriotic verse during the War of Independence, and his best known poem is "The Indian Cemetery," which displays the same regret for a vanished people as the Anglo-Saxon "The Ruined City".
Thomas Campbell stole, consciously or unconsciously, a line from this piece. Here is Campbell, in "O'Connor's Child"—
Now on the grass-green turf he sits,
His tasselled horn beside him laid;
Now o'er the hills in chase he flits,
The hunter and the deer—a shade.
Freneau has—